Markezich continues to make big strides
Fighting Irish standout has gone from freshman walk-on to elite collegian during her Notre Dame career
The game is slowing down is a phrase that football and basketball players often use when they describe how they have improved in various facets of their sports.
But Matt Sparks, the director of track & field and cross country at the University of Notre Dame, says a similar thing has occurred to Fighting Irish runner Olivia Markezich during the last six months.
Markezich won the women’s 3,000-meter steeplechase in the NCAA Track & Field Championships last June, but it was her fourth-place finish in the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships four weeks later that took her to another level. One that saw her finish third in the NCAA Cross Country Championships in mid-November — despite having a bout of rotavirus six days before the race — and then run the second-fastest indoor time in collegiate history in the 3,000 in the Boston University Sharon Colyear-Danville Season Opener two weeks later.
“After racing at the higher levels, competing at the USA championships, and then coming back to compete at the college level, everything slowed down for her a little bit,” Sparks said. “When you’re competing to make the World championship team and you’re in third place or fourth place, and she ended up fourth, and after the chaos that surrounded that moment, you come back to the collegiate ranks and things seem slower.
“You hear professional football or basketball players talk about how the game got slower after they figured out certain things. I think that’s what running has become to her.”
That doesn’t mean Markezich has everything wired when it comes to racing and training. There are always areas in which one can improve. But the graduate student who is working towards a master’s degree in Business Analytics was feeling pretty positive about what will hopefully be a long and productive 2024 campaign as she conducted a Zoom interview three weeks after she had run 8 minutes 40.42 seconds in the 3,000 in Boston to slash 10 seconds off her previous best and move to second on the all-time collegiate list behind the 8:35.20 record set by Katelyn Tuohy of North Carolina State last year.
“It just gives me more confidence that that is an attainable goal,” she said when asked if her performance in Boston changed her attitude about her chances of making the U.S. team that will compete in the Olympic Games in Paris in August. “That that’s something I should shoot for. My coach and I were talking at the end of last track season about how to put myself in the best position for the Olympic Trials, and obviously we want to try to race as little as possible so I can be as fresh as possible for the trials.”
Markezich is scheduled to run her second race of the 2023-24 indoor season on Saturday when she competes in the women’s mile in the Meyo Invitational at the Loftus Sports Center on the Notre Dame campus. Her next meet after that is expected to be the Alex Wilson Invitational at home on Feb. 17 when she will run the 1,600-meter anchor leg on a distance medley relay team.
The Atlantic Coast Conference Championships, in which Markezich plans to compete in the 3,000 and the distance medley relay, will be held at The TRACK at New Balance in Boston from Feb. 22-24.
Assuming things go as expected, Markezich will then compete in those same two events when the NCAA indoor championships are held at the same facility from March 8-9.
In last year’s national indoor title meet in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Markezich placed second in the 3,000 — to heavily-favored Tuohy — and also ran the anchor leg on the third-place distance medley relay team.
Tuohy’s victory in the 3,000 followed her dominating win in the 5,000 the previous night and to many followers of the sport, she looked to be head and shoulders above any other distance runners at the collegiate level. But she recently signed a professional contract with Adidas after finishing seventh in the 1,500 — and pulling out of the 5,000 — in the NCAA outdoor track and field meet last June and placing fifth — while reportedly battling an illness — in the cross country championships in November.
Markezich could be a big favorite in the 3,000 in the NCAA indoor championships in Boston, though there’s a good chance she has given little — if any — thought to that possibility as she prefers to take things one day, week, and meet at a time.
She’s also incredibly humble, according to her twin sister, Andrea, who was the No. 2 runner — while earning all-American honors — on the Notre Dame team that finished fourth in the team standings in the NCAA cross country meet in Earlysville, Virginia.
“She’s seriously the most humble person I’ve ever met,” Andrea said. “She refuses to talk about her accomplishments. When she does interviews on podcasts, it’s so hard for her to say what she has accomplished. I’m like, Just say it with some pride. You should be proud of what you’re done!”
Olivia’s humble demeanor might not come as a surprise when one considers her personality.
Andrea says “she’s a lot more shy than I am.”
Sparks calls her a “quiet thinker” who leads the Notre Dame women’s program by actions, not words.
Carla Darr, Olivia’s high school cross country coach at The Bear Creek School in Redmond, Washington, which is located about 10 miles northeast of Seattle, said she was a “little quiet giant” during her time at the small, private non-denominational Christian school.
“Olivia always encouraged every team member, even though there was a significant difference in abilities,” Darr added. “She was always encouraging every team member. That’s just who she is.”
Andrea Markezich, who ran for the University of Washington as an undergraduate student before joining Olivia at Notre Dame while also working toward a graduate degree in Business Analytics, said her sister is still very supportive of her teammates and always cheers for them during practice and races.
She added that Notre Dame’s women’s cross country and track and field program has an Instagram account called womenofndxctf (https://www.instagram.com/womenofndxctf/?hl=en&img_index=1) and Olivia “is always on there posting about her teammates’ accomplishments because she wants to hype up everyone else.”
Some of Olivia’s humbleness might stem from the fact that she was a good, but far from great runner in high school who typically ran 25-30 miles a week.
After growing up playing soccer, the sport in which she was a defender, she made the switch to running in high school.
After finishing eighth, sixth, sixth, and third in the 1A races of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA) state cross country championships during her high school career, she placed eighth in the Foot Locker West Regional as a senior in 2018 — a performance she calls a fluke — before finishing 36th in the 40-runner national final in San Diego’s Balboa Park.
She had track bests of 4:52.32 in the mile, 10:57.1 in the 3,200 meters, and 6:44.78 in the 2,000-meter steeplechase during her senior season in the spring of 2019 and was a walk-on when she came to Notre Dame that fall.
She had taken trips to Washington, Portland, and Cornell during the recruiting process, and also had telephone conversations with coaches at Cal Berkeley and Baylor. But she ultimately decided to attend Notre Dame, the school from which her father, Ron, had graduated and set a then-program record of 28:44.91 in the men’s 10,000 meters in 1989.
“My dad didn’t push me to go here at all,” Markezich said. “He definitely wanted my college choice to be my decision.”
With that in mind, he encouraged Olivia to make a visit to Notre Dame in January of her senior year, when the weather in Northwest Indiana tended to be at its coldest and most dreary.
Although Olivia’s visit occurred shortly before the arrival of a polar vortex, the weather did not deter her from coming to a school she had also visited as a junior.
Her athletic goal was simple, and considering everything she has accomplished, not super aspiring.
She wanted to improve enough during her first two years at Notre Dame so she could be one of the top seven runners on the women’s cross country team as a junior.
Therefore, she was ecstatic when she earned a top-seven spot as a freshman and finished 143rd in the 2019 NCAA championships.
“When I was able to accomplish that my freshman year, I was so shocked,” she said “And our team was 15th in the country. I was just so happy to be part of it. I was not expecting this at all. I never thought that I could be a national champion.”
Markezich followed her freshman cross country season by lowering her personal best to 9:25.33 in the 3,000 when she finished seventh in the ACC championships during the 2020 indoor track season.
However, the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. led to the cancellation of the NCAA championships in early March, as well as the collegiate outdoor track and field season in its entirety.
She placed 21st in the ACC cross country finals that October, although the NCAA had made the decision to hold the official 2020 national championship races in March of 2021 due to the pandemic.
With that meet being held two days after the conclusion of the indoor track and field championships, Notre Dame turned down an at-large bid to the cross country nationals to give some of its top runners a chance to compete in the undercover meet in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Markezich placed 13th in the 3,000 in 9:21.74 after previously lowering her best to 9:11.17 in the ACC meet.
Sparks said that Markezich’s performance in the 2020 ACC indoor meet just prior to when pandemic safeguards went into effect opened his eyes to her greater potential and he was further impressed when she ran 4:39.81 in winning an indoor mile race in the Lenny Lyles Invitational in Louisville, Kentucky, in February of 2021.
“When she won the slow heat [of the 3,000] in the ACC as a freshman, I thought she was somebody that could help our team,” he said. “But when she took her [personal record] from something like a 4:51 mile to a 4:39, running all by herself, I started to recognize that she was somebody that was going to make a national impact.”
After placing 10th in the steeplechase in the NCAA outdoor meet in June of 2021, Markezich made a splash at the national cross country championships in Tallahassee, Florida, in November when she finished 11th after moving up 17 places in the final kilometer of the 6,000-meter race.
However, she greatly disappointed herself eight months later when she placed ninth in the steeplechase in the 2022 NCAA outdoor track and field meet after Sparks told her before the race that her workouts indicated she was in superb shape and capable of contending for a second-place finish in a race in which BYU senior Courtney Wayment was the prohibitive favorite.
“I got to the starting line of the final and I was just so scared and so nervous and my heart rate was out of control,” Markezich said. “And when the race started, I just went to the back and I had no faith in myself and no confidence at all.”
Although Markezich moved up some on the last lap, she crossed the finish line in 9:35.80, two tenths of a second behind New Mexico senior Adva Cohen, whose eighth-place finish made her the final first-team all-American in the race.
“That was the only time where I actually cried after a race because I knew my potential was so much more than what I did,” Markezich said. “I knew I needed to change my mindset when it came to racing and really just be confident and positive going into races… That was definitely a huge aha moment and I was glad I had the summer after that to really build a big base and start to envision a great cross country season and get excited about racing.”
The 2022 cross country season was her best yet as she finished third in the ACC championships in Earlysville, Virginia, won the Great Lakes Region title in Terra Haute, Indiana, and placed eighth in the NCAA championships in Stillwater, Oklahoma, while leading Notre Dame to a seventh-place finish in the team standings.
“I always enjoyed the [training] a lot more than racing,” Markevich admitted about some of her previous struggles. “Racing was the one thing that actually terrified me. And then when I got to my junior year, that was when I really began to love the process of racing. Of going out there without fear and just having confidence and the mindset of let’s have fun and show off your fitness, show what you’ve been working for.”
Sparks said getting Markezich to believe in herself was a big breakthrough.
“Her confidence has been a little bit slower to develop than her physical abilities,” he said. “Physically, we’ve seen things in practice that made us think she could finish a little bit higher nationally. It’s just the confidence, and her fitness and confidence are really starting to match up well.”
He said that was clearly evident before the steeplechase final in the NCAA championships last year.
“I really reflect back on her national title in the steeplechase, and her demeanor the day of the race, the hour before the race, and then ten minutes before the start,” Sparks said. “I was watching her out there with everyone else and how calm and peaceful she was before the gun went off versus the way she looked previously when she was like a lot of kids who are jumpy and doing stride after stride after stride. Olivia just stood there and was at peace with what was going on around her.”
Olivia’s ability to “take pressure off herself” is another thing Andrea admires about her.
She said that Olivia, who was born one minute before her and jokes that it was the best minute of her life, is very good at staying relaxed in any situation.
“She doesn’t let anything mess with her mental state so she’s very mentally strong,” Andrea said. “And that is super important in distance running.”
She adds that Olivia always stresses the importance of having fun and balance when it comes to running.
“It’s really easy for runners to make it their whole life and just want to focus on running and that’s all they do,” Andrea said. “But she emphasizes the importance of doing things like hiking during the offseason and having fun with friends and having other aspects of life that you can focus on to keep that balance.”
Olivia credits Darr, her high school coach, with helping her fall in love with running, and being a good teammate and learning to love your teammates.
When asked about those comments, Darr said she thinks anything one does in life should be motivated by fun.
“If you’re not having fun, you’re not enjoying yourself and you can’t make the best of your God-given talents,” she said. “We were a very small school so you encouraged fun because you had athletes who were running for the first time in their life. And I think the most important thing is to enjoy running for life.”
Markezich, who currently runs about 60 miles a week, has come a long way since her high school days as she’s now one of the elite runners in the NCAA. Yet she recalls running in the U.S. Olympic Trials in 2021 and being in the same qualifying heat as Courtney Friedrichs, the American-record-holder in the steeplechase at 8:57.77 and a runner who would win a silver medal in the Games in Tokyo later that summer after previously finishing second in the 2017 World Athletics Championships in London.
“I was so starstruck to be in the same race as her,” she said. “And she talked to me. She said one sentence to me before the race and I was like, Oh my gosh, Courtney just talked to me!”
Although Markezich was eliminated in the heats of the Trials in 2021, she is expected to contend for a top-three finish in the steeplechase when the qualifying meet for the U.S. Olympic team is held at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, from June 21-30.
She finished fourth in last year’s USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships at the same facility when her time of 9:17.93 cut more than seven seconds off her personal best and left her 3.3 seconds behind Wayment, whose 9:14.63 effort gave her the third — and final — spot on the U.S. team that competed in the World Championships in Budapest, Hungary, last August. But Markezich said the Olympic Trials are too far in the future to focus on at the moment.
“I always take my seasons one race at a time,” she said. “So right now I’m only focusing on indoor and my next race… I don’t try to think too far in advance because I still have the whole NCAA indoor and outdoor seasons ahead of me. You can’t get too far ahead of yourself and you can’t start expecting too much this far out. You just have to focus on what you can do today and what you can do this week to put yourself in the right position six months from now. You just need to focus on the here and now.”